Rapid changes in business along with better informed customers threaten the traditional sales and procurement process. Thousands of sales and procurement people are threatened with extinction, yet all is not destined to be doom and gloom. A new way of partnering between these two roles can, in fact, create significant value for both organizations. Sales and procurement professionals have a bright future ahead of them if they can respond to six trends that the authors have identified in the business-to-business world. Each trend offers an opportunity to develop a new skill for sales and procurement professionals and adopt a new practice. Because these practices are not yet widely adopted as “best practices”, the authors coin them “next practices.” These trends include: working together to solve complex problems; organizing problem-solving networks across company boundaries; creating processes for live cross-company engagement; facilitating data driven, cross-company interactions fed by digital platforms; providing new personal experiences for individuals and lastly (and most importantly) creating new sources of value for firms. If these trends are adopted by organizations, the ability to co-create means providing significant value to both the sales management team at the supplier and the purchasing management team at the customer. With the alternative being that these job functions will be replaced by web-based or channel-based alternatives that will do most of what they do today at a fraction of the cost. Increasingly, there is no middle ground anymore. SAMs and senior buyers will either evolve into high value-added sales and procurement professionals, or disappear.

Storm is the most popular framework for real-time stream processing. Storm provides the fundamental primitives and guarantees required for fault-tolerant distributed computing in high-volume, mission critical applications. It is both an integration techno...

Principles of Big Data helps readers avoid the common mistakes that endanger all Big Data projects. By stressing simple, fundamental concepts, this book teaches readers how to organize large volumes of complex data, and how to achieve data permanence when...

Big data analytics is the process of examining large amounts of data of a variety of types to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, and other useful information. Such information can provide competitive advantages over rival organizations and res...

This book highlights the different types of data architecture and illustrates the many possibilities hidden behind the term "Big Data", from the usage of No-SQL databases to the deployment of stream analytics architecture, machine learning, and ...

The rapidly progressing digital revolution is now touching the foundations of the governance of societal structures. Humans are on the verge of evolving from consumers to prosumers, and old, entrenched theories – in particular sociological and economic on...

The Definitive Guide to MongoDB, Third Edition, is updated for MongoDB 3 and includes all of the latest MongoDB features, including the aggregation framework introduced in version 2.2 and hashed indexes in version 2.4. The Third Edition also now includes ...

Jobs in data science abound, but few people have the data science skills needed to fill these increasingly important roles in organizations. Data Science For Dummies is the perfect starting point for IT professionals and students interested in making sens...

Big Social Mobile shows that big data, along with social and mobile media, can improve enterprise performance significantly, but only when implemented in a holistic fashion. This book offers an integrative process that has helped a wide range of businesse...

Data warehouses have evolved to cope with the huge volumes of data flowing through the workplace by separating the data used for reporting and decision making from the operational systems. The purpose of the data warehouse is simply to store the raw data,...

Although Film Studies has successfully (re)turned attention to matters of style and interpretation, its sibling discipline has left the territory uncharted - until now. The question of how television operates on a stylistic level has been critically under...

The farming of animals for meat and milk confronts a stark dilemma. While world demand from a growing and more affluent human population is increasing rapidly, there are strong counter-arguments that we should eat less meat and pay more attention to envir...

Alfred Hitchcock and the cinema grew up together. Born in 1899, four years after the first 'official' film showing in Paris, Hitchcock demonstrated an early fascination with the new art of the cinema. He entered the film industry in 1920, and by 1925, he ...

In this text for upper-beginner and intermediate students, Brian Beyer collects authentic Latin prose from Book I of Eutropius’s Breviarium ab urbe condita, which covers Roman history from Rome’s foundation to the sack of Rome by the Gauls. Eutropius’s ea...

This book provides a range of essays on aspects of the British Conservative Party from the late 19th century to the present day. It offers fresh perspectives on Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism; Britain and Europe; UK policy towards Ireland; Conservatism...

A new survey of twentieth-century U.S. poetry that places a special emphasis on poets who have put lyric poetry in dialogue with other forms of creative expression, including modern art, the novel, jazz, memoir, and letters. Contesting readings of twentie...